The Enigma of Japanese Baseball-whacky

by Alan Booth (Sep 22, 1989)

Digitized by Jessica Suchman and
Catherine Nissley

When major league batting star Bob
Horner arrived in Japan in 1987 to play a season for the Yakult
Swallows he said: "This place is great." Twenty-nine games later
he said: "I've got to get out of here; I can't believe this shit."

The story of Japan's various collisions
with the West – collisions of expectation as much as of philosophy
or practice – has been told many times, but only once before in the
context of baseball, and that was by Robert Whiting in his 1977 The
Chrysanthemum and the Bat. To an
extent, Whiting's new book rehearses again the points made in the
first: that, superficial appearances notwithstanding, Japanese yakyu
is an entirely different ball game from its ostensible model in the
United States and that a study of the differences can be highly
enlightening in fields far removed from sport.

Japanese baseball
has "its own set of assumptions and values." Chief among these
are that "hard work and quality control" are the main essentials,
producing a game that is at once "as clear an expression of the
Japanese character as one could find," "barely recognizable by
Americans," and completely lacking in joy. Training for the game
consists of "endless practice, iron-handed discipline" and "blind
obedience to traditional virtues" and, when American players are
involved, the result is almost invariably a "clash of free-spirited
individualism with Japanese groupthink."

Two of the most
absorbing of Whiting's new chapters concern the Seibu Lions
franchise, which is owned by Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, by some accounts the
wealthiest man in the world, and the annual summer high school
tournament at Koshien Stadium. The latter is all about "spirit,"
"purity," "sacredness" and "the crucible of youth," while
the former demonstrates what happens to this "crucible" once big
business takes it over. But the bulk of Whiting's book is concerned
with chronicling the reactions and conclusions of American players in
Japan, and it is here that Whiting is at his best and his subject at
its most revealing.

If you set out to
invent the perfect metaphor for Japan's relations with the outside
world, you would be hard pressed to come up with a better one than
Whiting has found in baseball. American players (particularly former
major leaguers) are hotly sought after, very highly paid and the
objects of unremitting media scrutiny. They are also subject to a
quota system (only two active players per varsity team), are
invariably blamed when things go wrong, are the objects of
undisguised racial discrimination ("Nigger!" the Hanshin Tigers'
fans used to scream at Reggie Smith) and, the moment they show signs
of breaking records held by Japanese players or winning league
titles, they become the victims of wholly unsportsmanlike attempts to
stop them. Foreign players are "a necessary evil," observes Leron
Lee. "Let's have Asian baseball for the Asians only," advises
Isao Harimoto. "Pure-blooded baseball is ideal," asserts
commissioner Juhei Takeuchi. And Reggie Smith sums it all up as well
as anyone can: "This is not just a problem of pro baseball; this is
a problem of Japan."

Like
far weightier tomes (Karel van Wolferen's The
Enigma of Japanese Power,
for one), Whiting's book is about the practical incompatibility of
two systems that seem, at first sight, to have much in common and,
like van Wolferen's book, it reaches conclusions that are ultimately
depressing. But it also sparkles with enthusiasm for its subject, its
anecdotes are pertinent well beyond the walls of the Tokyo Dome, and
Whiting remains as objective as the evidence allows: "The only
thing that fully matches Japanese intransigence is the unwillingness
of many American players to bend even a little to please their
hosts." It is a story we are likely to go on hearing.